'technical' support me ar*e

smeggle wrote:

e300 for tech support (Software) is a rip off if you ask me...

Mate of mine who is a network engineer has just set up vpn tunnels to about 6 different offices. He had to get onto microsoft business tech support for some registry stuff etc. Paid e200 UNTILL the job was finished! It took 3 weeks to complete and they were there via e-mail helping out daily.

And if the guy your liasoning with don't know the answer they find someone who does! All for e200 and he still has further support ticket option on it.

As for formatting? Last thing in the world that I would recommend. Simple re-install xp (Make sure you have enough space), your old Admin account is there when you re-boot after the re-install but you'll need to change folder permissions as it will be locked. Transfer your data to your new account and delete your old one.

If your still getting blue screens/crashes after this then you obviously have a hard ware failure. Pull the drive and re-configure it to a slave, pop in another pc with an hd big enough to accomadate the data and recover the data. Fix the old pc and replace drive (Switched back to master). Try booting - in xp it should if not follow above re-install step/

What is so hard about that? It's first years beginners tech support for christs sake. You should be doing that within 6months of taking on any type of Tech Support.

Wheres the start button? I sympathise with all who have come across this but worst is the clowns who you say to 'Do this, now this and now that' and they answer you with They have some (WRONG) program open! I F***ing hate that :mad: LOL

You are missing the point also it seems... He paid €300 for 3 years of on-site warranty which covers ALL hardware failures for 3 years. Thats pretty damn good, its extra warranty.
Tech support is different.. its over the phone.. you cant ask customers to do all that kind of stuff themselves... and you CANT have engineers out there troubleshooting either... i know its catch 22 but a personalised service like you are talking about is only possible with small IT companies who do that sort of thing.. not large multinationals who sell 1000 computers a day in the UK and Ireland.
Think of the logistics involved.. it woulf require an engineer to drive a massive truck with every single part for every single model of PC made in the last 3 years in order to diagnose and fix the problem. The cost of which would make it impossible to provide the service for €300 for 1 month let alone for 3 years

If you did not get that sort of service from a small IT company then there would be call for complaint.

dbnavan wrote:

I know this is an old thread but just thought i'd let you all know, the harddrisk was replaced and problem came back so they took it away again last week and it arrived back with new motherboard, and memory.

When I phoned up tech support this time they checked the event viewer and where able to pin point it to hardware, just as I stated it was when this thread began, therefore all files on the hard disk need not have been lost as I stated to start with.

so what is your point? the hdd was faulty, it was replaced so in my opinion, the files were lost anyway? i work in tech support. we have simple procedures to follow. its 11 mins a call, we do our best to solve the issue over the phone, we recommend things to the customer, if they dont accpet and want it repaired, we will bring in the pc. however, if something that we recommend was not done and this solve the issue in the repair, the customer would then have to pay for this repair, even in warranty. if its a hardware fault, then its repaired totally free of charge, i think that is fair. as regards your problem, after a few minutes, we generally know what the issue is. repairing an operating system over the phone is not in scpoe of support, if it corrupt, its a reinstall or recovery as most companies tend to call it these days. i have experience with 3 companies in ireland and all 3 now dont ship xp disks with there computers, they ship recovery cds, so in theory, doing repairs from these disks aint viable. you seem to dwell in the fact that you knew it was a hardware fault, so what? remember one thing, an average call center will take maybe 2000 calls per day. for every customer like yourself that has a feeling that it id a hardware fault, there is probably 10 that cant be solved by something simple. recoveries are last options, well for me anyway, but the way the company that i currently work operates is, they might as well be done on the phone, because they will be definately be done in the repair and that is a fact. i have seen computers go in for ODD problems, come back with the OS wiped back to factory defaults. we dont care about data, it is the customers responsibility for data back up and if its some important, it should be done. recoveries are the only way to determine if is hardware/software and generally save alot of time.

I hear there were no second redundencies in there after all the waiting Saruman !

How is the POD machine movie collection these days? ! ....:-)